Blacked-Out Pacer Briefs Easy to Read in GE Bias Lawsuit
A plaintiffs law firm didn’t succeed in blacking out large portions of information in briefs filed in a sex discrimination lawsuit against General Electric.
The Connecticut Law Tribune revealed that blacked-out information in briefs accessible through the Pacer electronic filing system could be read by copying and pasting the data into a Word document.
“Voilà,” the story reads. “Information about the inner-workings of GE’s white, male-dominated management and their alleged discriminatory practices against women, which is supposed to be sealed by court order, appears with little technical savvy required.”
Lead plaintiffs counsel David Sanford of Sanford, Wittels & Heisler in Washington, D.C., was surprised to hear of the problem. “I didn’t know that,” he told the Law Tribune. He said paralegals were responsible for redacting the information.
GE spokesman Gary Sheffer told the Law Tribune the documents were supposed to have been filed under seal “and we’re concerned.”
The story says it is difficult to redact information using old versions of Adobe software. N. Kane Bennett, a member of the Connecticut Bar Association’s Legal Technology Committee, said the process is “cumbersome” and requires multiple programming steps. The newest version of the software makes scrubbing hidden text much easier.
The bias suit was filed by GE lawyer Lorene Schaefer, who was demoted from her job as GE Transportation’s top legal officer.
